---
display_title: "How We Build With AI at Hyprnote — And Why AI-First Teams Win"
meta_title: "How We Build With AI at Hyprnote"
meta_description: "A personal look inside how Hyprnote works with AI every day. Why engineers who embrace AI become unstoppable, why business generalists are losing leverage, and why small AI-native teams now outperform large ones."
author: "John Jeong"
created: "2025-12-01"
published: true
---

For the past year, I’ve heard endless takes about how “engineers are dead” because of AI.  
But from where I’m sitting, building Hyprnote day and night, it’s the *business guys* who are actually disappearing.

Our team has been running full-speed with AI in our development workflow. [Devin](https://devin.ai), [Cursor](https://cursor.com), [Zed](https://zed.dev), [Claude Code](https://www.claude.com/product/claude-code), [Warp](https://warp.dev), [GitButler](http://gitbutler.com) — we use all of them, sometimes at the same time. And honestly? Our commits per hour exploded so fast that the idea of “let’s hire more engineers” stopped making sense. The velocity just isn’t the bottleneck anymore.

<Image src="/api/images/blog/how-we-build-with-ai/tools.jpg" alt="AI tools used in Hyprnote"/>

Once you embrace AI deeply, the limiting factors become taste — design taste, product taste, code review taste. If someone can’t contribute meaningfully to those areas, they actually slow things down. Negative velocity is real.

Meanwhile, engineers who lean into AI become unstoppable. They write more. Ship more. Break fewer things. Learn absurdly fast. There is no ceiling on their growth anymore. Only how quickly they can refine judgment.

But business generalists… man, their world is collapsing. Everything they brag about — emailing, researching, organizing, coordinating — gets obliterated by AI. Most of it is automated, summarized, or handled instantly. The leverage curve is flattening hard.

If you can’t build, can’t design, can’t review technical work, and can’t wield AI like a power tool… you’re slowly getting replaced by people who can.

**The future is simple: builders win. AI-augmented builders win even harder.**


## Why I'm Writing This Series

I want to document how we actually work at Hyprnote — not the polished PR version, but the real workflows that help a tiny team ship like a much larger one.

We’re not “adding AI” to our stack. We *build* with AI as the default.

And Hyprnote sits right at the center of it. Every conversation becomes captured locally. Every decision becomes context we can revisit. Every idea gets distilled and carried forward. AI creates output fast, but Hyprnote gives it memory and direction.

This series is my attempt to share that openly — the good parts, the messy parts, the stuff I wish someone told me a year ago.


<Callout type="note">
If you’ve ever wondered how small teams can now outperform big ones, this series is basically us opening our playbook.
</Callout>


## What’s Coming Next

In the next post, I’ll break down our full engineering stack — Devin → Cursor → Zed → Hyprnote → GitButler — and how each piece fits into a single loop. With actual examples from how we ship features every day.

After that, we’ll get into:

- how we do AI-assisted code reviews  
- how we use Hyprnote as our shared company memory  
- how our design cycles got 5× faster  
- why small, sharp teams are the new superpower  

This will be a living, honest series. No hype, just how we actually operate.

## A Small Personal Note

I’m writing this because I want more teams — especially small ones — to feel this kind of momentum.  
AI didn’t remove the need to think. It removed the need to drown.  
Now the real differentiator is clarity, taste, and courage.

If that resonates with you, stick around. And if you want a tool that keeps your team’s thinking sharp and your conversations durable, give Hyprnote a try. It’s how we work every single day.
